Role Reflection: Eye of the Hurricane by Emma Brown

To really get into the mindset and feel of a natural disaster, I write this barefoot. Just as my feet desire to be freed from the confinement of footwear, a hurricane refuses to be confined in any way. Going barefoot feels natural, wild, laidback, and informal. There is nothing formal about a hurricane. It causes destruction if it makes landfall, it affects the weather hundreds of miles away. It makes a big dent in many ways.

There is a calm before the storm, and then small waves begin to mix with high winds. As heat and pressure builds, the storm intensifies – with the eye of the storm as the control center in the middle of chaos. This is what I keep in mind in my role as the Eye of the Storm – an almost calm and calculated expression even as the cyclone continues to spin faster and faster. All control lies in me. I am powerful and strong. I make the decisions. Taking all of this emotion and choreographing a performance piece on a new (to me) apparatus is a fun (and dizzying) challenge.

The scene begins with ocean waves beginning to mix with sudden temperature changes and increasing pressure. The eye of the storm then awakens and begins brewing a briny concoction of the fear, intensity, and destruction. As the finale piece in a show about the state of the world that we live in, we are portraying what is to come next if we don’t begin to make changes in the right direction. This piece speaks not only of environmental degradation, but also of current human rights issues such as immigration from Syria into Western Europe and police brutality against minority groups here in our own country. If we let these kinds of issues build and build, we can only expect a hurricane-like ending.

Image from Golden Spiral: Complex Geometries in Nature

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